


the only thing that i learned in school is life treats you well if you're cool

by searchingforstars



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies)
Genre: Big Brother Peter Parker, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Not Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Compliant, Precious Morgan Stark (Marvel Cinematic Universe), Protective Peter Parker, mentions of bullying
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-18
Updated: 2019-11-18
Packaged: 2021-02-12 20:55:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,719
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21482704
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/searchingforstars/pseuds/searchingforstars
Summary: Peter has known his entire life that kids are cruel.He just wishes the universe could have spared Morgan for a little while longer before mercilessly throwing that fact into her face.
Relationships: Pepper Potts/Tony Stark, Peter Parker & Morgan Stark (Marvel Cinematic Universe), Peter Parker & Tony Stark
Comments: 24
Kudos: 531





	the only thing that i learned in school is life treats you well if you're cool

The first sign that something is wrong is that when Peter kills the engine of his car and gets out, the lake house is silent.

Save for a few birds chirping somewhere nestled in the pine trees above him and the crunch of gravel underneath his worn down Nikes, there’s nothing.

It makes absolutely no sense for a Thursday afternoon.

Granted, he isn't often here on a Thursday, but Midtown is hosting a national technology conference over the weekend, so with the students excused for Friday in order for the school to set up, Peter's taking advantage of being able to have three nights with the Starks rather than his usual two. He told Morgan this himself too, last night when he was on the phone with Tony.

She’s settled into a routine where whenever he’s on his way up, she _ always _ remains in view of the driveway so that she can make sure that she’s the first to race over and give Peter a hug as soon as he arrives. But all her usual spots, out on the front porch with a playset, down by the lake in her tent or annoying Tony in the garage as he works are eerily empty.

Even Tony isn’t in sight, the metal of the garage door pulled down to cover whatever is currently being worked on. 

Peter tries to brush it off as he grabs his overnight bag up off the floorboard of the passenger side, but the second sign that something is wrong comes when he pushes the door to the house open and there’s still no sign of movement or life apart from quiet murmuring from the kitchen. 

He follows the sound, leading him to where Pepper and Tony are sitting opposite each other at the dining table. Both of their foreheads are creased with worry lines, wrinkles which remind Peter that the both of them are getting older. He kind of hates it. 

He reaches up to knock his knuckles against the doorframe in a gentle greeting.

“Hey, guys? Uh, is this a bad time? Is everything okay?

At the sound of his voice, they both seem to break out of their reverie and glance over to where Peter is standing in the doorway with his bag still slung over one shoulder. 

“Never a bad time, Pete, you know that,” Tony says in lieu of a greeting and waves him further into the kitchen. He slips his bag off and toes it into the corner of the room, presses a quick kiss to Pepper’s cheek to say hello before dropping into a seat beside Tony.

Tony immediatley takes a second to pull Peter towards him in a slightly clumsy one-armed hug and drop a kiss of his own to the crown of his head. Peter revels in the warmth.

They haven't seen each other for a week and honestly, he’s missed Tony more than is probably even in the ballpark of moderately healthy.

When he and Tony pull apart, he looks between him and Pepper with slightly narrowed eyes.

“Seriously guys? What is going on? Because I’ve been here for literally like,” Peter checks his watch, “five minutes and I haven’t had my Morgan hug.”

“What, the two of us aren’t enough?” Tony ribs.

“I want my Morgan hug.”

Tony glances at Pepper. “She’s upstairs. In her room. She won’t let either of us in and we don’t want to just barge in,” he admits, “trust and boundaries, all that parenting stuff, y’know? I picked her up from school and there was something wrong, she was so quiet and I tried to get her to talk about it and I obviously pushed it too far like the fucking _ idiot _ that I am-”

“_Tony_” Pepper admonishes gently, “I told you. None of this is your fault.”

Tony frowns at the words but doesn’t bother trying to argue with her. At least he’s finally learnt that that’s a useless feat. 

“Do you want me to try?” Peter asks. Once upon a time maybe he would have been hesitant, worried that by asking he would be stepping on Tony and Pepper’s toes, suggesting they were inadequate parents or assuming too much about his place in their lives, his place in their family. He doesn’t worry about that anymore though.

Morgan is his little sister. No insecurity or doubt is clouding that fact anymore, she’s his sister and he’s her brother and that’s just a fact, biological parents and bloodlines completely disregarded. Who needs them anyway?

Pepper nods. “If you would, even just to see if she’ll let you in? I don’t like the idea of her sitting up there all alone.”

“I mean if she won’t let you guys in I doubt she’ll let me in, but it’s worth a try,” Peter resolves. 

  
  


He knocks on Morgan’s door a few minutes later once he’s left Tony and Pepper at the dining table and dumped his stuff onto the bed in his room. He’s not sure if he expects a response, and for a little while, he doesn’t get one. 

He tries again, softer this time. 

“Hey, Morgan? It’s Peter. I just wanted to come and say hi.”

He waits.

There’s only silence again and he’s sure that he’s been rejected just the same as Tony and Pepper, not sure why he ever thought he might be any different, when there are tentative footsteps on the other side of the door. They hesitate for a moment before the doorknob turns and the door cracks open ever so slightly. Big brown eyes peek out distrustingly as if she doesn’t believe it’s just Peter, but once she sees that it’s only him standing in the hall, she opens the door wider. 

Her eyes are watery and there are tear tracks down her cheeks which fills Peter to the brim with the immediate urge to _ fix_, to try and make sure that she never feels like this again. 

He steps into the room and she doesn’t move, hand gripping the doorknob tightly as she watches him - not distrustfully anymore but carefully all the same. “I’m gonna come hang out with you, if that’s okay?”

There’s a barely-there nod of her head. She closes the door behind him.

She scurries back over to her bed and wraps herself up in the knitted throw that’s crumpled up in the middle of the bedspread. Her knees press up into her chest and her arms wrap around them, making her look smaller than she already is.

Peter’s heart shatters into pieces at the sight.

He settles down onto the bed next to her, absentmindedly toying with the tail of one of her many stuffed animals as he contemplates his next move. He knows that as much as his instincts are telling him to ask Morgan what’s wrong to figure out how he can fix it, he’s sure that’s exactly what Tony tried to do when he picked her up from school and that didn’t end well. 

He can’t push, he has to remind himself. He might be Spider-Man, used to fighting, pushing back against the bad and the unfair to try and create a sense of justice but Morgan and her problems aren’t battles to be fought, though. Not by Peter, at least. She’s an upset first-grader in need of comfort and she doesn't need anyone to go in guns blazing for her. She just needs comfort, cuddles and maybe someone to sneak her an extra square of chocolate after dinner.

All of those, Peter can do just as naturally as he can take a criminal down on patrol.

“What do you think we should do this weekend, Mo?” he asks instead, starting small. It’s safe. He already knows what she has planned anyway, she explained it all to him eagerly on the phone last night, plans for trips to the newest candy store that’s opened in town and building the new Lego dinosaur set that she got as a reward for mastering her eight times tables. 

She doesn’t recite any of this to Peter though. She just shrugs a little and curls further into her blanket. 

“We could get Dad to get the canoes out from the garage again like last weekend. It’s meant to be nice and sunny on Saturday,” he suggests, and Morgan finally lifts her head again to turn and look at him. 

“Can we?” 

“Yeah, of course. Only if you bring Mister Otterton.”

Morgan giggles at this. Mister Otterton is her stuffed otter, who she very adamantly insists is a _ freshwater _ otter, and therefore, obviously, she has to bring him on every single canoe trip they take on the lake just in case they see any of his family members. Peter thinks it’s endearing. Tony just worries that she’s going to drop the damn thing overboard and send them all over the edge with her if she scrabbles to try and retrieve it. Peter does concede that it’s probably also a very valid concern. 

She rummages around under her pillows on her bed until the produces the light brown stuffed Mister Otterton. She hugs him to her chest.

“Mister Otterton _ always _ comes,” she says, like Peter is the most ridiculous person in the world for forgetting this fact and the tightness wrapping around Peter’s chest starts to ease as she begins to sound more like herself.

“Of course he does, silly me.” 

They sit in silence for another minute. Then Peter asks how her reading test went at school yesterday. She tells him that she’s moved up another reading group. Peter showers her in praise and she blushes. She tentatively picks up a book from her nightstand and starts telling him all about it, the new story that Tony is reading to her before bed and then about the trip Tony and Pepper have promised to take her on to Bronx Zoo for her sixth birthday. 

  
  


Eventually, they’ve been sitting scrunched up on her child-sized single bed for close to an hour. Peter’s phone lights up with a text from Tony asking whether they’re both still alive in there and if they’re planning on coming downstairs any time soon. 

He’s just about to ask when Morgan glances up at him suddenly. There’s an urgency in her eyes that he hasn’t seen all afternoon. It’s the look she gets in her eyes when Peter watches Tony or Pepper teach her something and she needs to know more, desperate for answers to her questions.

“Am I too dumb to be an astronaut?” 

Peter frowns, slightly taken aback. That kind of came out of nowhere. He leaves Tony’s text unanswered and shoves his phone back under a pillow to give his full attention to Morgan. 

“What? _ No_. No, absolutely not. You’re the smartest girl I know, Mo. Who told you that?” 

Morgan shrugs. “It’s careers dress-up day at school tomorrow,” she says as if that answers Peter’s question.

“Okay…” he says carefully but she seems to catch onto his confusion.

“I wanted to go as an astronaut,” she explains, “for dress-up day. I read a book in the library and it said that there are like _ no _ girl astronauts and that’s really dumb.”

Peter nods. “Yeah, that sucks. I bet you’d be the best astronaut, though.”

“But Allie told me that I have to be a princess because her and Katie and Alex and Rina are all being different princesses. I have to be Belle because I have brown hair,” Morgan says with clear distaste. “I said someone could just wear a wig but they said that was a stupid idea but I don’t want to be Belle, Petey. I like princesses but I don’t want to _ be _ one when I grow up. That’s silly.”

“I think you should go dressed up as whatever you want, Morgan. Being an astronaut sounds totally awesome. If they’re really your friends then I’m sure they won’t mind if you don’t want to be a princess with them.”

Morgan shakes her head. “Allie and Kate said that they wouldn’t be friends with me anymore if I don’t go dressed up as Belle. And then they said that you have to be smart to be an astronaut and that I’m not so I shouldn’t dress up as one. I thought that was mean,” Morgan mumbles.

Peter wraps an arm around her shoulders and tucks her into his side.

“You’re right. That was mean, but they’re wrong. What you want to dress up as is your choice. Besides, do you really want to be friends with people who try to make you feel bad? They don’t sound like very good friends,” Peter says gently, and Morgan shakes her head from where she’s resting against his shoulder. 

“But then I won’t have any friends.”

“That’s the fantastic thing about friends, Mo. You can always make more, as many as you want. I’m sure tomorrow there will be people dressed up like so many cool things and you can go sit with whoever you think is going to do the coolest job. You don’t have to be friends with people if they’re being mean to you Morgan, in fact, you definitely shouldn’t be friends with them because they’ll just make you sad, and that makes me, Mom and Dad sad too.”

God, Peter wishes it was all as easy as he’s making it sound to Morgan. He remembers being her age and being shunned from group after group of kids at his elementary school for his slightly wonky glasses, asthma in gym class and his tattered, dog-eared copy of _ 101 Cool Science Experiments _that he carried everywhere with him. 

He can’t tell her that it gets better because sometimes it never does. He suffered through elementary only to be pushed around and shoved into lockers in middle school, coming out the other side of that to still be tormented by Flash all through high school to this day.

But he’s made friends. He has Ned, and MJ, and a few other people on their decathlon team who share the same view that Flash is a piece of shit. Having friends makes it easier. That’s all he can hope for Morgan, because kids are cruel, he’s known this his entire life. He just wishes the universe could have spared Morgan for a little while longer before mercilessly throwing that fact into her face. 

Morgan twists in his hold so she can look up at him, hopefulness clear on her face. 

“Even if I make new friends, are you sure I’m not dumb? You and Mommy and Daddy are so smart and I don’t want to be dumb.”

In his head, Peter curses out every single five-year-old girl that put these ideas into Morgan’s head today.

“You could never be dumb, bug, your brain is way too big for that,” he smiles and taps the top of her head gently. She giggles again. “But you know what? Even if you _ weren’t _super smart, even if you didn’t know how to add one plus one together, I would still love you to the end of the earth.”

“There is no end of the earth. It’s round.”

A surprised laugh escapes Peter. “You’re right. See? Smartest girl I know.”

* * *

When they step out of Morgan’s room and back downstairs, Morgan is immediately swept up into a hug by Pepper. She buries her head into her mother's neck and bursts into tears, the day finally catching up to her. 

Pepper mouths a thank you to Peter over Morgan’s shoulder, cradling her close to her as she walks them both from the room to try and calm Morgan down.

Peter just slumps down on the sofa next to Tony, feeling as if all the energy has been drained out of him by this afternoon. Tony reaches out to tug Peter closer to him until his head is resting on his lap.

“Hey,” Tony murmurs, and Peter looks up at him. 

“Hi.”

“You okay?”

“Yeah… just, I dunno. Sad, I think.”

Tony nods. “Wanna tell me what happened in there? Or did your little sister swear you to secrecy?”

“Nah it’s okay, she was just telling me about school tomorrow and her careers day."

"Ah. Yeah, I think we had an email home about that or something."

"Apparently, all her friends, who sound like right pieces of work, by the way, wanted to go as princesses but she wants to go as an astronaut instead,” Peter explains. “It sounds like they all called her too stupid to be one when they found out that she didn’t want to dress up with them and I think she just took it to heart.”

Tony huffs out a quiet sigh and rubs a thumb across Peter’s collarbone. 

“I - I don’t, why are kids so _ mean_, Tony?”

“It’s just a part of life, bud. Some people are just nasty, kids, adults, the whole lot of ‘em.”

Peter hums noncommittally. “Well, I wish they’d leave Morgan alone. It makes me feel very morally ambiguous when the thought of beating up five-year-olds crosses my mind.”

Tony snorts. “I get that, kid. The number of times I’ve wanted to march down to Midtown to knock the lights out of that Flash kid? Unparalleled.” 

Something warms inside his chest at Tony’s admission. Then an idea springs to mind.

“You still have all of my old shit up in the attic, right?”

When Happy and May moved in together into the least cramped apartment they could find in the overcrowded city of New York, they still hadn’t had room for the boxes and boxes of Ben’s belongings, Peter’s childhood toys and memorabilia, the general chaos that the Parker household has always been shoved into boxed and taped down very carefully. 

Now, those boxes sit above their head, in the Stark’s attic. For Peter, it almost feels poetic, having a little bit of Ben here with him, even if it’s just a police uniform and a few checked shirts inside an airless box that hasn’t been opened since a few weeks after he died. With Ben and Tony here, nothing can touch him. 

He likes to think they would have liked each other. 

“Yeah, pretty much, I think. Just apart from all the stuff you and May wanted to throw out. Why?”

“I think some of my old Halloween costumes might be up there. I have an idea.”

* * *

Half an hour and a trip up into the attic later, Morgan is parading around the living room in a 2009 Target brand kids astronaut costume.

He still remembers May and Ben taking him to the Target at the end of 70th Ave in Queens to buy it after he’d been invited to a Halloween party for the first time in his life by a girl at school when he was eight. He was promptly uninvited the next day, of course, and felt _ terrible _ about May and Ben spending all that money on him but Ben took him trick or treating around the local bodegas that were giving out candy and now, instantly exceeding any hopes he'd had about the stupid party anyway. 

The nylon fabric of the thing is slightly creased and making a crinkling sound whenever Morgan moves. It probably smells a little musty from years tucked away with various of Peter’s other Halloween costumes from over the years - a robot, a cowboy, a scientist and even a cheap knock-off Iron Man costume. It’s a boys size so it hands a little baggy off her small frame and the helmet keeps twisting the wrong way. 

None of this matters though because she’s grinning ear to ear, talking their ears off with facts she learnt in her _ Galaxy Girls: Women in Space _ book. 

Peter and Tony are still sprawled on the couch and when Morgan throws herself into Pepper’s lap, Tony takes the moment of silence to lean over closer to Peter. “Thank you, thank you, _ thank you_,” he says in a quiet whisper into Peter’s ear. “Big brother of the year award for you, every year.”

Peter watches Morgan, fondness alight in his eyes. That’s an accolade he’ll gladly accept. 

* * *

Peter walks Morgan to her classroom when he drops her to school the next morning, and hovers around outside in the hallways with the rest of the other parents. 

He notices Morgan tense at his side before he follows her line of sight to a gaggle of small girls dressed in princess outfits. He recognises most of them from her birthday party last year. Morgan doesn't stop though, she just walks straight past with her head up high. She’s not trying to hide herself away like Peter has spent years doing at school and he’s so incredibly happy to see that.

Morgan is far too bright, intelligent and extraordinary to ever try and hide herself away.

Peter stops in front of her outside the doorway to her classroom. He doesn’t ask her if she’ll be okay. He knows as a kid that only incites anxiety. If an adult is doubting whether I’ll be okay, will I? Instead, he kneels down on one knee to be at her height and looks into her eyes. “You’ve got this, Morgan. You’re the most badass astronaut I’ve ever seen,” he leans in closer to whisper to her, “and out of anyone, I’d know, I’ve been to space.” 

_ And it sucked and I never want to do it again. _

“Our secret though?” 

“Yeah, our secret, Mo. No one can know your brother’s been to space. They’ll be way too jealous otherwise.”

“Okay,” she said seriously, before reaching up to press a kiss to his cheek. “I love you.”

“I love you, too. Have a good day, I’ll see you after school,” Peter promises and Morgan seems satisfied with this so she turns and makes her way into the classroom, already filled to the brim with kids dressed up as doctors, flight attendants, construction workers, superheroes and athletes. 

He watches Morgan make her way past a table full of princesses to sit down next to a little boy dressed up as a firefighter. 

Peter doesn’t hesitate when he turns away to walk away from the classroom. He doesn’t doubt that she’ll be okay. 

The world could use more firefighters and astronauts anyway. 

Fake friends and princesses be damned. 

**Author's Note:**

> title from "i spend too much time in my room" - the band camino
> 
> come say hi on [tumblr](https://searchingforstarss.tumblr.com/)!


End file.
